Nervos CKB Development Update #7

Covering Mar 11 to Mar 24

TL;DR

• CKB has switched to the new P2P library.
• CKB VM has merged the baseline JIT in master.

Changes in RFCs

PR#83 has been accepted as RFC0017. It suggests adding a new consensus rule to prevent a cell to be spent before a certain block timestamp or a block number.

PR#91 adds data structure document. It also captures the ongoing script refactoring changes in ckb#344.

Changes in CKB

CKB has frozen the code for v0.8.0.

The major change in the version is the P2P library switch (#295). The new P2P library brings back the network discovery feature (#340).

Developer @jjyr did several refactoring related to the peers management:

• #345: Add random_peers function to PeerStore
• #356: Unify network peer scoring
• #349: Refactor peer store

These refactoring allow us to implement the future reputation rules for better security.

@zhangsoledad made the code safer and easy to debug to avoid the usage of unwrap.

• #350: Use TryFrom convert protocol. This prevents the node crashing on invalid network messages.
• #346: Replace unwrap with expect.

He also added several missing verifications while sorting out the RFC0016.

• #335: Enforce type field of a cellbase output cell must be absent
• #334: Version verification
• #341: Verify tx cycles in relay protocol

@quake refactored some code with CellProvider (#343). This refactoring is intended to remove closure in ChainService and duplicate code in ChainState.

@u2 finished another task of cellbase outputs maturity checking, #336, which indexes whether a transaction is a cellbase in the chain.

There are two features which are going to be included in v0.8.0, but are not merged yet.

• #344 revises script structure to make the model simple and elegant.
• #355 integrates sentry to capture errors.

Changes in CKB VM

• The baseline JIT is merged into master! Now it’s organized as an optional feature, we will continue be testing and working on the baseline JIT to make sure it is both fast and secure
• Refactoring work are going on in the CKB VM repo to make it better: PR#31, PR#32, PR#33, PR#34
• We are also working on upgrading CKB to use the latest CKB VM in time for the testnet

Changes in P2P

• Update discovery protocol PR#66, PR#71, PR#74
• Add an error type (MuxerError) PR#70
• Add keypair API to ServiceContext PR#75
• Abstract transport layer(prepare for support websocket) PR#76
• Fix dial failed bug PR#79

Changes in Toolchains

CKB Explorer

• Prototype design and project plan.
• Start initial project.

CKB Testnet Faucet

• Integrate Swift SDK with SPM (Swift Package Manager)
• Implement lock tool
• Refactor backend/frontend

Ruby Demo

• Improve tests
• Update blake2b scripts and docs
• Extract SDK and refactor

Ruby SDK

• Extract SDK from Ruby Demo

Swift SDK

• Remove Ruby unlock script
• Improve tests
• Add SPM support

Java SDK

• Remove Ruby unlock script
• Improve RPC interfaces and tests

JavaScript SDK

• Remove Ruby unlock script
• Add blake2b-wasm type definitions

Misc

• Update scripts (system & ruby) with blake2b, fixes bugs